By Allen Guelzo, Princeton University
In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian minister and then a professional lecturer and essayist, was invited to deliver an address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at his alma mater, Harvard College. At that time, Emerson may not have regarded Harvard College as a Mount Everest of human learning, and in 1837, it really wasn’t.
Emerson’s ‘American Scholar’
Emerson replied to the invitation with a major address, which he entitled ‘The American Scholar’, and which he intended to be a philosophical and intellectual equivalent of the Declaration of Independence.
Emerson declared,
American thinkers have remained colonial dependents of Europe. We might be politically independent of Europe, but not intellectually, and American thinkers have been content to turn out mere imitations of European philosophy, but the day is at hand when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.
It has been easy to read this and conclude that Emerson was addressing a sort of intellectual desert in America, with American thinkers gnawing out a bare subsistence from the cactus of European philosophy. Emerson was a bit too pessimistic of how vital and bouncy and ingenious American intellectual life really was, though.
Emerson himself might not have found all that much in America’s sluggard intellectual that pleased him, but that has to be disentangled from Emerson’s discomfort with the conclusions American intellectual life was drawing, as much as any question about its quality.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Colleges in America
Though Emerson probably disregarded Harvard College as epitome of human learning, what Americans may have lacked in the way of quality in their institutions of learning, they certainly compensated for in terms of quantity.
Fifty new colleges were opened in America between 1776 and 1800, and they included places like Middlebury, Bowden, Hampton Sydney, Washington (which is now Washington and Lee University), and the college at Charleston. By 1840, there were 78 colleges dotting the American landscape, including the beginnings of a number of state-founded university systems.
These colleges, in turn, began to spin off graduate professional departments, beginning with the organization of the College of Philadelphia’s Law School in the 1790s, and the creation of theological seminaries, beginning with Andover Theological Seminary in 1808 for the Congregationalists, and Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812 for the Presbyterians.
Rise in Publications
The American passion for schooling fostered exceptionally high rates of literacy and, with that, a pretty impressive market for reading, too. The 200 newspapers printed in the United States in 1800 grew to over 2,500 in 1860, while magazine publication rose from 125 in 1825 to 600 in 1850. The American book trade alone grew from $2.5 million per annum in 1825 to $16 million by 1856, and then to $20 million by 1860.
Over the same period of time, the sales of books actually written by Americans increased from one-third of that total to nearly two-thirds.
Reactions to the Enlightenment
What Ralph Waldo Emerson was really objecting to was not the vitality of American thought, but to the kinds of thought that he personally disliked. For good or for ill, the American Republic was shaped—intellectually as well as politically—by the Enlightenment. Its philosophical life could be summed up as a series of reactions to the Enlightenment.
A good deal of its scientific, political, and legal thinking followed the same path when Thomas Jefferson sat down to write the Declaration of Independence. He turned it into pretty much an Enlightenment tract on political philosophy as much as a statement of the rationale for American independence. The British Empire had outraged the very fundamental principles of human nature, Jefferson claimed, not just the specific examples of British history and tradition, and not an attack on religious truth; the British were conducting an assault on a universal collection of natural rights whose very existence was unquestionable and self-evident.
The Federalist Papers
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay also sounded an Enlightenment note in The Federalist Papers by assuming the existence of natural and universal laws of human nature, which was the virtue of the American Constitution to have recognized and built itself around.
“Governments, if they are to have any hope of legitimacy and any hope of success, must be constructed,” said The Federalist Papers, “to recognize the transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.”
Common Questions about American Education and the Influence of the Enlightenment
Fifty new colleges were opened in America between 1776 and 1800. By 1840, there were 78 colleges dotting the American landscape, including the beginnings of a number of state-founded university systems.
The colleges began to spin off graduate professional departments; they began with the organization of the College of Philadelphia’s Law School in the 1790s, and the creation of theological seminaries, beginning with Andover Theological Seminary in 1808 for the Congregationalists, and Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812 for the Presbyterians.
The American passion for schooling fostered exceptionally high rates of literacy and, with that, a pretty impressive market for reading, too. The 200 newspapers printed in the United States in 1800 grew to over 2,500 in 1860, while magazine publication rose from 125 in 1825 to 600 in 1850. The American book trade alone grew from $2.5 million per annum in 1825 to $16 million by 1856, and then to $20 million by 1860.
